TAMING THE TEMPEST 25

accomplish a great good, sin a great sin. There are no heights and no
depths" (272).
 Given this image of Bermuda as an "isle of negation," the personality
of the primary subject of the novel does not come as a surprise. Lily is
a beautiful, devastatingly heartless Bermudian mulatta living in the
parish of St. George's. She is described as having, at first glance, a
"perfect" face, a "dazzlingly fair" complexion, and hair like "the gold of
moonlight on water" (45). Yet, at second glance, we are told that "her
loveliness did not suggest the gentle beauty of English wild flowers...
she was of the tropics; there was something aggressive in her languor,
in the redness of her small curved mouth, in the slight thickening at its
corners. Her eyes were blue, with lids a little too heavily folded...her
nose, however, fell short of perfection. True, it was a small nose, in no
way calculated to arrest attention, but though straight enough along
its ridge, the nostrils lay a shade too flatly upon the cheeks, and were
thickened in their curve. Lily herself tried to press them inwards, but
they resisted her attentions"(45-6).
 Lily is in no way a character that evokes sympathy; she is portrayed
as a liar, a deceitful manipulator; someone for whom it is habitual to
despise people, especially members of her own family. Her Aunt
Stephanie Innerfield, who also attempts to pass for white, encourages
her niece to rise above the stain of leprosy in the family and her
coloured blood; urging her to marry either "an American for money, an
Englishman for family. Either would take you out of Bermuda, and
once away you can forget" (110). But the title of the book is ironic
testimony to Lily's inability to escape her roots. When an artist visiting
the island decides to paint Lily's portrait, he accentuates "the cruelty
of genius...the Ethiopian whisper in her lovely face" (56) and names
his picture "The Painted Lily." The local children taunt Lily by singing
derisively, "Lily, Lily, they call you Painted Lily! Painted Lily, tainted
Lily, Lily painted black" (146).
 Ultimately, Lily's secret is exposed and her marriage to a white
Englishman is destroyed; although she admits that she "can't run from
heredity," she eventually leaves Bermuda and becomes a famous film
star before abruptly ending her career and becoming a nun in a leper
colony. But like many novels in the "tragic mulatto" tradition, The
Painted Lily functions both as a warning to blacks about the futility of
passing, and as a warning to whites about the dangers of integration
and the inherent taint of Caribbean creolity.
 Beyond the more obvious issues of racism in The Painted Lily, the
text is particularly disturbing because it exists almost in a